Gov IT supermarket G-Cloud will cost £4.93m, says Maude

£340m to be saved - but won't say how or where

The British government has published numbers on the cost of G-Cloud and Cloudstore and the savings the public sector ICT procurement framework is expected to make.

The government reckons G-Cloud and Cloudstore will cost the taxpayer £4.93m to set up and run, but eventually save £340m.

The costs will come out of the budget of the Cabinet Office, which is led by minister Francis Maude, the MP cheerleading the government’s digital agenda.

Maude revealed the numbers in response to questioning from Labour MP Michael Dugher.

There was no indication of how Maude's numbers on savings were calculated or whether these were estimated over a period of years or were a one-off saving.

There was no mention, either, of numbers for the government’s policy of open data. Government watchdog the National Audit Office last month slammed the government’s release of data, saying that the government had not performed any sort of cost/benefits analysis, that the opening of data had actually increased government spending and that the government's policies on open data were all over the map and inconsistently applied.

Dugher had asked Maude what estimate he’d made for the cost of the full implementation of the G-Cloud and Government Application Store.

The MP also wanted an update on progress in the government’s plan to consolidate its data centres, outlined in October last year.

According to Maude, that data will be published alongside an ICT Strategy annual update report that is “due shortly” - it was due last month but has now slipped to the end of May. The ICT Strategy document that it will review was published in March 2011. ®